MoAF tops the 3rd na­tional web­site com­pe­ti­tion

For the sec­ond con­sec­u­tive year, the min­istry of agri­cul­ture and forestry was de­clared as the win­ner of the third na­tional web­site com­pe­ti­tion which was con­ducted by the De­part­ment of In­for­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy and Tele­com un­der the Min­istry of In­for­ma­tion and Com­mu­ni­ca­tions.

The dec­la­ra­tion of re­sult was done last Tues­day coin­cid­ing with the World Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions and In­for­ma­tion So­ci­ety Day (WTISD).

Although the web­sites for the min­istry is not very new, Chief ICT Of­fi­cer of Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture and Forests Keshav Raj Gu­rung said that the rea­son for win­ning the web­sites is that their web­sites is the one which is very ac­tive and trans­par­ent be­cause they up­dates all the time when there are any up­dates. This has been quite of many years.

“Our web­site is very se­cure and ac­tive. There was a time be­fore that so many web­sites are been hacked but our web­site doesn’t get hacked,” said Keshav.

Ac­cord­ing to the press re­lease from MoIC, the pur­pose of ob­serv­ing the day, WTISD was to help raise aware­ness of the pos­si­bil­i­ties that the use of the in­ter­net and other in­for­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies (ICT) can bring so­ci­eties and economies, as well as of ways to bridge the dig­i­tal di­vide.

Sec­re­tary for Min­istry of In­for­ma­tion and Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Dasho Kin­ley Dorji, said that the day is very im­por­tant and it is not just tele­com, its world in­for­ma­tion so­ci­ety which means tele­com, me­dia and even cul­ture.

The sec­re­tary said that while talk­ing about in­formed so­ci­ety, even our govern­ment has a vi­sion on this par­tic­u­lar theme that Bhutan’s as­pi­ra­tion to be­come a knowl­edge so­ci­ety.

“So on this day, it’s not only cel­e­brat­ing but it is also im­por­tant to think of what needs to be done and needs to think how tech­nol­ogy should serve ev­ery­one in the so­ci­ety,” Dasho Kin­ley Dorji added.

He said that the needs to em­pha­siz­ing only needs to think of what we are do­ing, but it is very im­por­tant to think that what we are not do­ing and what needs to do.

“Get­ting ac­cess to in­for­ma­tion and knowl­edge us­ing tech­nol­ogy and tech­no­log­i­cal aware­ness in skill level, Bhutan is rel­a­tively low, so we have much to do,” re­it­er­ated the Sec­re­tary.

As a part of the cel­e­bra­tion, the min­istry started an in­cen­tive to rec­og­nized ICT cham­pion ev­ery year dur­ing the WTISD cel­e­bra­tion and it was also de­cided to award prizes for third web­site com­pe­ti­tion win­ners on the same day this year. How­ever, due to poor turnout of nominations, the ICT Cham­pion award was post­poned to 22nd June, 2016. The nominations are still open and will close on 3rd June.

Mean­while, a to­tal of 126 web­sites were regis­tered in the first round of eval­u­a­tion but four were elim­i­nated from the list due to its in­con­sis­tent up­time and du­plic­ity. Four­teen pri­vate firms vol­un­tar- ily regis­tered their web­sites for eval­u­a­tion, six less in com­par­i­son to its pre­ced­ing com­pe­ti­tion.

The press re­lease stated that the eval­u­a­tion of web­sites was car­ried out to en­cour­age agen­cies to use their web­sites as a ma­jor chan­nel for shar­ing in­for­ma­tion and ser­vices. Be­sides that it is also to en­sure reg­u­lar up­dates and en­hance­ment is made to web­sites also to in­crease the utility of web­sites for our cit­i­zens and to im­prove public de­liv­ery.

The eval­u­a­tion were car­ried out by eight in­de­pen­dent eval­u­a­tors con­sist­ing of ex­pe­ri­enced ICT per­son­nel from do­mes­tic pri­vate IT firms and ISPs to en­sure that the eval­u­a­tors are pro­tected their in­di­vid­ual rat­ings have been kept con­fi­den­tial.

The ac­tual eval­u­a­tion was car­ried out in three rounds where each round was con­ducted for a pe­riod of ap­prox­i­mately one and half months. The en­tire du­ra­tion of the com­pe­ti­tion was for ap­prox­i­mately nine months.

The press re­lease fur­ther stated that over the time from the first as­sess­ment to sec­ond and now the third as­sess­ment, the gen­eral ob­ser­va­tions are that the fre­quency of in­for­ma­tion be­ing up­loaded and the cur­rency of in­for­ma­tion on the sites have im­proved. The over­all web­sites down­time has also de­creased. How­ever, there has not been much im­prove­ment in the de­sign and the value ad­di­tional fea­tures of the web­sites.

Only few agen­cies such as na­tional coun­cil, na­tional as­sem­bly of Bhutan and royal civil ser­vant com­mis­sion has re­vamped their web­sites after the ini­ti­a­tion of this com­pe­ti­tion. Other agen­cies still need to work on the au­then­tic­ity and com­plete­ness of the in­for­ma­tion pro­vided on their web­sites.

Mean­while, the prizes for the top three web­site were award with an ipad Air 2, Sam­sung Galaxy Tab A and 3G data card along with the pre­paid voucher card worth of Nu. 2,350 re­spec­tively and was awarded by Sec­re­tary of MoIC.